One more quick post before I sit back down to work. Glenn Greenwald examines “Bipartisanship” in modern day Washington and compiles a rather amazing set of data. Forgive the long excerpt and go read the rest of his post:

In almost every case, the proposals that are enacted are ones favored by the White House and supported by all GOP lawmakers, and then Democrats split and enough of them join with Republicans to ensure that the GOP gets what it wants. That’s “bipartisanhip” in Washington:
To support the new Bush-supported FISA law:
GOP – 48-0
Dems – 12-36

To compel redeployment of troops from Iraq:
GOP – 0-49
Dems – 24-21

To confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General:
GOP – 46-0
Dems – 7-40

To confirm Leslie Southwick as Circuit Court Judge:
GOP – 49-0
Dems – 8-38

Kyl-Lieberman Resolution on Iran:
GOP – 46-2
Dems – 30-20

To condemn MoveOn.org:
GOP – 49-0
Dems – 23-25

The Protect America Act:
GOP – 44-0
Dems – 20-28

Declaring English to be the Government’s official language:
GOP – 48-1
Dems – 16-33

The Military Commissions Act:
GOP – 53-0
Dems – 12-34

To renew the Patriot Act:
GOP – 54-0
Dems – 34-10

Cloture Vote on Sam Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court:
GOP – 54-0
Dems – 18-25

Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:
GOP – 48-1
Dems – 29-22

On virtually every major controversial issue — particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism — the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to “bipartisan” support. That’s what “bipartisanship” in Washington means.

Democrats are to blame for this state of the world, but I’d point out that there is NEVER pressure on the Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner. Think about all the times you’ve heard about bipartisan compromises and then think about how many times the Republicans have been asked to break from the President or the party line by the media. I used to watch CNN every day when I worked at ESPN. I can tell you it never happened.

It’s ridiculous.

People are railing on these stories individually, but together they’re even worse. On one hand, we have the Politico, a political web site founded by former Washington Post editors, reporting that Romney had a $300 makeup bill. Who the hell cares?! They go on TV. They’re going to spend before major appearances. Even if they spend a lot on how they look, it’s NOT IMPORTANT!

Glenn Greenwald has a good rundown and makes two excellent points. First:

One of the reasons why vapid petty-personality “journalism” of this sort has so disadvantaged liberals and so advantaged right-wing fanatics is because the latter are not only willing, but droolingly eager, to exploit these sorts of themes, while liberals in general are highly reluctant, almost embarrassed, to do so. Thus, even after months of John Edwards being mauled in every media venue as a result of the Pulitzer-worthy haircut “scoop” by The Politico’s Ben Smith, these are representative reactions by liberals to the Romney “story”:

Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly:

MAKE IT STOP….From the front page of The Politico on Monday: . . . Seriously. Can we just stop this stuff? Does anyone really think that the problem with presidential campaign coverage is that it isn’t vapid and half-witted enough already? Jeebus.

Melissa McEwan, Shakespeare’s Sister:

OMG — Who GIVES a Shit?!

I swear to the fates, if there’s ever a museum of internet journalism, celebrating the best the web has to offer, The Politico would best be represented by a turd in the unfinished basement bathroom.

The only remotely non-critical reference I can find to the Romney story is this seven-word statement from Oliver Willis, which seems more satirical than anything else.

Absolutely right. I’m not playing for a team, I’m just upset that this stuff is on the news at all.

Greenwald’s also points out that as of right now, because of the relentless media pursuit of the Edwards’s haircut story, more people know about Edwards’s haircut story than knew that Saddam was not connected to 9/11 at the start of the war. Think about that. It almost makes me cry, I’m so angry at that. Read the rest of his post, it’s worth it.

The other story I’d like to put along side this is the continuing inability of our press, including the wire services (AP, Reuters), to use the word filibuster in their reporting of the Republicans’ tactics in the Senate. It’s ridiculous. This lack of information will have more impact in the 2008 elections than anything else because you can bet on the fact that Republicans will call the Democrats as do-nothings. Already, you can see the story line shaping up in articles like this one from the Economist. They go through the entire article without mentioning the procedural delays being introduced by Republicans for every bill.

As Trent Lott said, The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail … and so far it’s working for us.” It’s not working for the American people, though, who continue to suffer with a Congress that won’t pass anything because Republicans are obstructionist losers. And the strategy will work as long as it doesn’t get reported.

Put those two stories together and you see what our political media has become, a farce, a useless appendage instead of a meaningful fourth estate.

Glenn Greenwald provides a decent recap and summary of a controversy about a source used by AP when reporting an episode of sectarian violence. The story was remarkable because it quoted an Iraqi police captain who recounted that nearby Iraqi soldiers did not intervene to stop the Shiite militiamen. The captain was quoted by name. You can read more about the controversy at Greenwald’s blog, but the end result is that the right wing blogs were full of hot air. They were completely and totally wrong on this but refuse to apologize to AP or admit they were wrong.

As Greenwald points out, the episode is more telling about the way these blogs operate and how they integrate into the national media than most people realize. While Greenwald focuses on the bloggers who are not afraid to make stuff up, this is a larger issue that carries throughout all media platforms. From Michelle Malkin and others in the blogs to folks like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh on radio to Brit Hume and Bill O’Reilly, the entire right wing media establishment is rife with people like this and episodes like this.

The Greenwald post is long, but I urge you to read it. After you’re done, think back to every Clinton era scandal. Then remember that every single one of the Clinton’s supposed scandals led nowhere. Not one panned out. The scandal that eventually brought Clinton to impeachment was not one invented by the right wing media establishment…

These people are not afraid to make stuff up, and they leave a lasting impression.

I had someone make an Al Gore/Internet joke to me the other day. It still persists even though the guy never said he invented the Internet. That came from a Republican press release the day after and was mutated and mutilated by Rush and company until Leno and Letterman made it a national given.

It’s likely that the perception created by the made up scandals and the intentional misquotes cost Gore votes. Imagine a world where a man like Gore, who has more integrity and intelligence than Bush, was running foreign policy. Afghanistan would be a better place, a better effort would’ve been made to seal off Tora Bora when bin Laden tried to escape (maybe we’d have him), and we wouldn’t be in Iraq.

Who says correcting partisan bullshit doesn’t matter? It matters.

I read this from Atrios earlier today, talking about the war in Iraq:

Ezra asks:

When will the media realize Bush doesn’t care what they think, cease talking about what he should do, and begin, relentlessly and mercilessly, talking about what he is doing?

Never.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

But, okay, I can’t resist the longer answer. Magical thinking has long pervaded this entire enterprise, and the pundits who supported this whole thing long ago decided that they could evade responsibility for their role in this by continuing to come up new Pony Plans. They can’t come to grips with the fact that this whole enterprise is doomed – and, in fact, has long been doomed – and they can’t come to grips with the fact that no matter what they say George Bush is the decider.

The choice has never been between Pundit Fantasy Plan and getting out. The choice has always been between George Bush’s Plan and getting out. The punditocracy has chosen to operate in the fantasy realm, pretending that their Pundit Fantasy Plan is an option. It’s allowed them to continue to avoid looking at the real choice and concluding, as anyone should, that getting out is a better choice than continuing with The Decider’s Plan.

And why are they doing that? Because they’d rather be wrong than agree with the dirty fucking hippies, even though few of us actually smell like patchouli. The impact of their fantasy thinking is to ensure that George Bush continues to be able to fuck things up. And they say we’re unserious.

It’s not just that they’d rather be wrong, which is obviously not the case. It’s that they don’t want to admit that they are wrong. The pundits, which provide much of the political analysis in the United States, amazingly have a stake in this war. They have a piece, as much as the Republicans, in seeing this war succeed. They chose a side, and with it became truly biased in their analysis and reporting.

The Republicans, for all of their other flaws, have done one thing well. They have co-opted the media into choosing a side. By using accusations of liberal bias, of anti-religiousness, of being anti-American or traitorous, they have convinced the national punditocracy to own these policies as if they were the government. When you read journalism scholars talk about rollback, it’s really about making the press choose sides.

This practice was perfected in the Bush years as they chose winners and losers in the media space by granting exclusive interviews with only friendly outlets and by setting aggressive ground rules for interviews. It is his one, singular accomplishment and likely the only aspect of his legacy that will remain long after he leaves office.

You may have heard the “big” news today: NBC is now calling the situation in Iraq a “civil war.” This is apparently big news. Of course, not everyone is doing so. The Washington Post isn’t calling it a civil war, for example. The reason they’re not? They say it’s because the Iraqi gov’t doesn’t use the term.

NBC said more or less the same thing this morning when they announced their change in policy, claiming that the White House’s reluctance to call it a civil war was a key reason they hesitated to make the change. I get that, but at the same time, I’m confused why it matters.

At some point we’ve become a press and a society that requires the government stamp on things to make them “true” or “real.” I’m not really sure why this is, as we should be able to look at something and call it what it is. If a news organization feels like the situation in Iraq has become a civil war, why does it matter that the White House doesn’t endorse that view?

It’s just weird to me. I don’t need them to simply repeat what the White House says, but to provide an intelligent analysis and reporting on top of whatever the government is saying. Highlighting meaningful contradictions between official policy/pronouncements and what their own reporting is saying is pretty much their core function, isn’t it?

Of course, I think it’s telling that the only two articles on MSNBC.com (the web site for the Today Show and NBC News, not just MSNBC) about this new policy from NBC are from Reuters. After all, how much original reporting actually happens in ABC, NBC, or CBS these days?

Update: This isn’t to say that there isn’t something worth debating in whether it’s a civil war or not. More on the subtleties of the debate at TPM. For what it’s worth, I’m with Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings: This is a civil war, albeit an unconventional one.

I linked to a video yesterday that described the level of violence in Iraq. Atrios and Hilzoy both link to this video from CNN where reporter Michael Ware describes what he’s seeing in Baghdad and why there’s no choice but to call it a civil war.

He doesn’t mince words, does he?

The myth of a liberal bias in the media has been perpetuated so long that it’s become part of the conventional wisdom. Republicans have been crying foul and playing the victims in the media so long, it’s hard to believe that there’s not some truth to it. After all, would people go on TV and the radio day-after-day for so long lying?

The answer apparently is yes. From the sad saga of Mark Halperin to the reality-denying radio hosts, we’ve seen more and more evidence recently that the media does it’s best to perpetuate the Republican storyline of the day.

Eric Boehlert has a new piece up at Media Matters that details some of the reporting around the elections. From Time and Newsweek to ABCNews and MSNBC to, well, all talk radio that isn’t Air America, Republicans were on the march to come from behind last Tuesday. No evidence was given aside from the invincibility of Republicans. Post election coverage, not detailed in the Media Matters piece, hasn’t been any better. Hardly seems like a liberal media.

What’s worse is that this problem is caused by laziness more than anything else. No one wants to do any actual reporting, especially on the TV side. CNN, Fox, etc. all act as aggregators of stories from other media. Therefore, getting something printed once at a “reputable” media outlet can be enough to get wide play on all the major news nets. It is lazy reporting.

I’m not really sure how we go about fixing this, but it’s clearly reaching a critical point. We have a media that would rather cover scandal than debate and finds no value in informing the public. It’s a system that’s broken in some pretty fundamental ways.

I’ll leave it to you to explain why.

The original is on Newseek’s site, and I found this via this blog thanks to Atrios.

This defines the modern political landscape:

I was flipping through the channels briefly this evening and caught Sean Hannity saying that if the Connecticut primary race had been held next Tuesday rather than yesterday, Lieberman probably would have won.

Just think, Joe Lieberman might not then have been blasting his constituents and the Democratic Party as well as Ned Lamont as appeasers of terrorism. Those words are going to be tough for Lieberman to walk back when he realizes he’s ticked off a good number of Dems and Independents who thought Lieberman was more judicious and thoughtful than his knee-jerk outbursts demonstrated.

But Hannity’s comment was actually useful.

Can Lieberman win without FEAR? Can Cheney and Rove win another election without FEAR?

Can Fox News stay in business without FEAR?

The answer is obviously no. And it’s not just limited to terrorism, but to science, religion, environmental policy, name it and the Republicans focus on the traditional tool of the marketer: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Opposition to gay marriage is founded on some non-specific fear of the destruction of, well, something… society? “Values?” I’m not even sure. Opposition to environmental policy is founded on non-specific fears about jobs and the economy. Just talk about vague fears, scare people, and get them in line behind your banner of protection. Unfortunately, it’s false security, and I’m sure we’ll be talking about how our use of military power precipitated a decline of American power in the future.

When things like the silly Santorum/Hoekstra claim that “weapons [of mass 'death'] have been found” persist to rumble around mainstream news sources even though the claim is completely dishonest, it makes me very sad.

I’m not really asking for the media or Senators to be without bias. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, however, to ask that they strive to be truthful. When the media is presented with garbage like this, they should (respectfully) call the Senator and Congressman on this. That even applies to Fox News. Bias, after all, doesn’t necessarily have to be dishonest.

It’s not like we would invade every country with a vial of a disease or a few hundred degraded shells of chemical weapons. More importantly, that’s not even the standard the Bush administration set. After all, Santorum and Hoekstra are pushing this story as a justification of the war in Iraq and to bolster claims that the Iraq war was not a mistake. Essentially, they claim, we found what we were looking for.

What were we looking for, though? I read a suggestion to check the 2003 State of the Union Address to see what the President outlined, so I decided to take a look. Here’s the list of what he claimed and what we’ve found of that category:

I’m not really sure how Sen. Santorum sleeps at night when he makes claims like this. I’m not sure how the reporters and pundits who attempt to reinforce these claims sleep at night either.

Have you ever watched you local evening news and felt like the story was almost a commercial for some product? I know I have. Often times, I catch it when the local news is doing a story on some Internet scam or so-called “threat.” Often good information will be mixed in with spin that encourages people to buy some class of product, e.g. an Internet security program. Well, turns out that my local station might have been playing a video news release (VNR) by a software company. They pay the news show to air the bit, effectively inserting a small paid programming advertisement into your news broadcast.

The Center for Media and Democracy has compiled a small list of VNRs that you can watch unedited as well as how the new program aired them. Often, the station will incorporate some local or new footage with the VNR to make it seem more authentic.

It’s a pretty dishonest practice only because they don’t disclose the fact that the companies are paying for this. What’s more disheartening is that it’s not just small city or smaller regional networks doing this, but even stations in larger cities.

(via Atrios)

I still think they’re partisan hacks, but even the Corner at NRO has issued an apology for the plagiarism committed by Ben Domenech when he wrote for them. They go through and actually pull out sample quotes and include them. The apology seems sincere. I’ve gained a lot of respect for them in this.

I’ve been thinking about this for a bit off and on over the last few days. I don’t want to read too much into a single situation, but most of what I’ve been thinking is how someone like Domenech believes they’ll get away with this type of behavior. This isn’t a Jayson Blair type who’s simply trying to make a reporting name for himself. This is a person who aims to create controversy and to provoke people that disagree with him.

One thing I’ve learned about the political blogosphere is that they are nothing if not vicious and thorough. Do something to irk the blogs and they will descend, en mass, onto Google, Yahoo, personal contacts and friends, and build a thorough catalog of your life. Domenech, a “prominent” member of this community and founder of Redstate.org, must know this.

So, knowing that folks like Media Matters would get PDFs of the actual print editions and that Google will turn up every electronic version of his articles, why did he continue to lie? Why?

Is it possible that he didn’t understand the severity of what he was doing? That changing a few words here and there still constitutes plagiarism? Nearly every English teacher I had in high school emphasized the importance of not plagiarizing others’ works. It was hammered into us from the very first term papers, perhaps even in middle school.

Again, I don’t want to read too much into it, but Domenech is proud that he was home schooled. Perhaps he didn’t get this lesson at home? Whatever the case, it’s clear that he doesn’t get it. His latest defense is that one of his pieces was “inspired” by the original and ran credited as such. Even then, taking the original text and just changing sentences is still plagiarism unless you quote the parts you left alone. That’s not inspiration, that’s recycling a column.

The hatred and angst here is unfortunate, and ultimately not a helpful thing. Just read some of the comments on the various blog posts I’ve linked to… ugh. In the end, however, this guy should’ve resigned as he did earlier today. And, quite frankly, he should’ve apologized right away when he was caught rather than coming up with seemingly absurd defenses for his actions. Didn’t the Republican world have something to say about that with a certain ex-President?

I posted earlier about the new “Red America” blog at WashingtonPost.com. The blog is really pretty silly, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it will, in the end, be a pretty unimportant blog. It’s still infuriating that the Post felt that they needed a conservative blog with no ideological equivalent on the left.

However, the story took a weird turn today as numerous folks found evidence of plagiarism in Domenech’s earlier works. Many of these are movie reviews, which apparently are OK to plagiarize if you’re a conservative partisan. Some are from college, others are from his professional writing career (such as it is, writing for uber-partisan NRO, etc.).

I wrote music reviews at Hopkins for the News-Letter for a short while. I realized it wasn’t as important as my academic writing, but even then I approached it with the same set of ethics and integrity. Plagiarism is wrong, period. Wholesale copying of sentences and paragraphs goes beyond paraphrasing or inspiration. It’s clearly laziness and representative of the type of ethical deficiencies that should prevent someone from getting a gig at a place like WashingtonPost.com.

(first instance found via Atrios)

Where is the f’ing “Blue America” blog? Do we really need mainstream media institutionalization of partisanship? This is so wrong on so many levels, I can’t even begin to address it. It’s literally making me sputter at my desk. Stupid Washington Post doing even more stupid things. I can’t believe this.